The reality of BTC that too many (and myself) dont want to believe.

[Steve]

My response to this is quite simple: if bitcoin is too much for you to handle, then don't bother.  Continue to use whatever makes you feel comfortable.

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[mobile4ever]

Do you know how hard it is to manually create TCP/IP packets. 

You are right, but i simply have to comment on this. Creating TCP/IP packets from scratch including IP fragmentation headers is very complex. This is how I by accident discovered that I could make win95 computers reboot, AKA teardrop attack. Pure luck or let's say bad coding ;-)

Many important things in science were discovered by accident.

[ArticMine]

People think the general public will use bitcoin. Most people cant even understand copy an paste or saving to the network file server and somehow they will understand backing up wallets and recovering transactions. These are the same people who hit print 20 times because their document didn't print.

STOP and look at BTC as a basic computer user would and its overwhelming. One mistake and all you BTC are lost and unrecoverable, it is enough for most to avoid it. The PC as a wallet/bank is also a joke. So many people don't even know their AV has expired YEARS ago and don't install updates because they are to dumb to read the messages about the update on the screen in front of them.

The other choice is to use the system in place now that allows Fraud protections, the recovery of cash through charge backs and FDIC and Europes Deposit Insurance Funds etc.....  

The BTC community is full of techies, crypto folks, programmers and the like. This is why it thrives.
The average joe/jane doesn't get it and doesn't care to becasue he/she is too busy trying to keep his/her house and feed his/her kids..

How many of you would continue if your country made it illegal to create and use BTC and would sieze your assets if you were caught? I bet almost none of you would risk it. I certainly wont.

This exact argument could have been made in favor of AOL, Minitel and a host of other services over the Internet 20 years ago. Now where are these services vs the Internet today?

[edd]

I like to compare Bitcoin to smart phones. My mother (a grandmother) doesn't have one, doesn't understand them, doesn't want one and never will. This attitude isn't uncommon within her demographic yet smart phones still seem to be doing pretty well.

[Piper67]

Yup, OP's premise is silly. Do you know what email looked like back in 1994? Do you know the hoops you had to jump through then just to send or receive an email? Of course Bitcoin, as it exists today, won't have mass appeal. But even compared with a year ago, a flash in the pan really, it is riders of magnitude more secure and user-friendly now.

Another six or seven years, and it could easily see widespread adoption.

[cbeast]

We need institutional development funds to make Bitcoin useful. Bitcoin can do more to stimulate the global economy, but it needs to be easily accessible and useful to business. It would be nice if someone in government as forward thinking as Al Gore was (in terms of appreciating developing technologies) would spend a few million bucks developing Bitcoin technology.

[Topazan]

I think that bitcoin will become easier to use, but we have to remember there's a difference between knowing how to use bitcoin and knowing how to use it securely.  Many people consider malware to be a simple fact of life and do very little to protect their computers.  They'll be vulnerable to keyloggers, phishing, and whatnot and have to regulatory agency to turn to when their coins are stolen.  More than a few will wipe their hard drives without realizing the need to back up their wallet.dat.

I think that e-wallets/hybrid wallets are the future for "normal" people.  That way, they won't need to worry about backups, and the service can require additional verification for large spends.

[fivemileshigh]

People think the general public will use bitcoin.

Theres an implied premise here that would completely changenyour view of this question, and that is, what kind of time frame are you looking at?

Are you wondering if the general public will use bitcoin tomorrow? Of course not

Will it be next year? Probably not

Will it be in 10 years? Maybe

How about 100?

[Timo Y]

[...]
people who grew up working with technology can work with technology in more complex ways than you realize. for example, programming skills are probably the new form of literacy.

I'm not sure about that.  It is true that teenagers are more fluent at using computers passively. It is true that a technically-minded subset of teenagers is growing up programming from a young age.  But the majority of teenagers doesn't know how to write even the most basic program, neither are they interested in learning.  

In fact, the general purpose computer is on the decline, so don't expect programming to rise in popularity.  Just because everyone knows how to drive a car doesn't mean everyone needs to be a mechanic and tinkerer.

Anyhow, for larger amounts of money, the bitcoin client can be moved to dedicated, highly secure hardware.  For small amounts, you can use online wallets. Both aren't harder to use than Facebook.

  

[drakahn]

What's the modern day equal of a C64?
As in, what would you buy a kid these days to get the same effect a C64 had on a generation

[superfastkyle]

Even though I wasn't around at the time, even I have seen the pre/early internet. You think when there were a bunch of geeks playing text games on a BBS, they were thinking the internet would have gotten this far, or even have anything close to the idea that 70 year olds would be playing flash games on Facebook. FTP, Gopher, how many other protocols were there that weren't user friendly. Even html by itself would not have gotten the internet to the masses. We needed the AOL's, the Compuserve's, the Yahoo's to make the internet get really popular. We needed something to "baby step" them through the internet if you will. So maybe that is the solution to bitcoin a gateway of sorts, whether it is a visa loaded with bitcoin or something similar

I do another huge reason the internet became popular when it did was instant messaging. There must be some more social aspect of bitcoin we could utilize

[softwareseller]

That would be one more reason for me to use BTC if it's illegal.

[Timo Y]

Even though I wasn't around at the time, even I have seen the pre/early internet. You think when there were a bunch of geeks playing text games on a BBS, they were thinking the internet would have gotten this far, or even have anything close to the idea that 70 year olds would be playing flash games on Facebook. FTP, Gopher, how many other protocols were there that weren't user friendly. Even html by itself would not have gotten the internet to the masses. We needed the AOL's, the Compuserve's, the Yahoo's to make the internet get really popular. We needed something to "baby step" them through the internet if you will. So maybe that is the solution to bitcoin a gateway of sorts, whether it is a visa loaded with bitcoin or something similar

I do another huge reason the internet became popular when it did was instant messaging. There must be some more social aspect of bitcoin we could utilize

And don't forget: We needed porn to prove that e-commerce is viable.

Despite tainting the reputation of Bitcoin, that is pretty much what Silk Road is doing for Bitcoin right now.

[HeavyMetal]

How many of you would continue if your country made it illegal to create and use BTC and would sieze your assets if you were caught? I bet almost none of you would risk it. I certainly wont.

This really shows your ignorance. Do you realize that making something illegal does not suddenly make the masses stop doing it? People did not stop smoking pot because it was illegal, they can't even keep drugs out of prisons.

Prohibition does not work, it never has. Not even once.

[jim618]

How difficult is bitcoin to use really ?

Say I want to set up a friend to use MultiBit on a Windows machine, send them some BTC and get them to spend it online.

Let's start with a piping hot cup of coffee that is still too hot for us to drink.

Setup
1) They download an installer from multibit.org's main page, double click it and then it is click-click-click and accept the licence. Done in a couple of minutes.
2) They double click the MultiBit icon. There is a wallet all made for them. Fast catchup ensures they are synced to the network in less than a minute.
3) The first time MultiBit is opened they get a friendly welcome screen.

Get some bitcoin
1) To request some BTC, click on the Request tab. Let's press the Zoom button so that their onscreen QR code fills the screen. This makes it easier for me to zap it with my smartphone.
2) I zap the QR code and then send them some BTC from my phone's bitcoin app.
3) They receive it in a few seconds. I will then explain to them about confirmations and show them the Transactions help with the confirmation icons.

Our coffee has now cooled down enough for us to enjoy at a perfect temperature whilst we wait for the first confirmation.

Spending
1) Say they want to give multibit.org a donation.
2) Go to multibit.org. Click on the donate link or QR code (bottom right).
3) In MultiBit: accept the payment request. Press Send. Confirm the Send.


When encrypted wallets come in, they will have to do 'File | Add Password' and follow a short screen of instructions to encrypt their wallet(s). Then on a Send they must enter the wallet's password.

It is no more difficult to use than online banking.

[mobile4ever]

How many of you would continue if your country made it illegal to create and use BTC and would sieze your assets if you were caught? I bet almost none of you would risk it. I certainly wont.

This really shows your ignorance. Do you realize that making something illegal does not suddenly make the masses stop doing it? People did not stop smoking pot because it was illegal, they can't even keep drugs out of prisons.

Prohibition does not work, it never has. Not even once.

Your point was proven a few posts ago..↓

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=101380.msg1109993#msg1109993

[mobile4ever]

How many of you would continue if your country made it illegal to create and use BTC and would sieze your assets if you were caught? I bet almost none of you would risk it. I certainly wont.

Here is what I think:

[sethsethseth]

I'll let someone else answer the "usability" hysteria, which is mostly true, and not very relevant:

"I predict that Bitcoin will reach usability sometime around 2019. I base that prediction on earlier disruption technologies, where blogging started appearing in 1994 and reached mainstream adoption in 2004; file sharing started in 1989 over the net and Napster hit in 1999. You had streaming video 1995, mainly porn sites streaming animated gifs, what was then tip of the spear technology; Youtube was founded 2005 and just swept the floor with everyone else just because they were usable. This is not something bad; it is just an observation that it takes ten years to get a disruptive technology from inception to becoming so easy to use that it reaches mainline adoption." - Rick Falkvinge

[Melbustus]

Yeah, I honestly can't decide if I think the bitcoin is currently equivalent to the "internet" in 1980 or 1990. The core theoretical developments, proof-of-concept software dev, and initial building of services on top of the core platform is all done. There's a fervent community of supporters, many of whom are very bright and dedicated. That's 1980 internet. Are we beyond that? I don't know... There are bunch of add-on services, but total number of users is still thin (in 1990, millions of kids (eg, ~10yr olds) were using the internet....that is not true of bitcoin right now).

Regardless, the development cycle is probably shorter these days.

[doobadoo]

People think the general public will use bitcoin. Most people cant even understand copy an paste or saving to the network file server and somehow they will understand backing up wallets and recovering transactions. These are the same people who hit print 20 times because their document didn't print.

STOP and look at BTC as a basic computer user would and its overwhelming. One mistake and all you BTC are lost and unrecoverable, it is enough for most to avoid it. The PC as a wallet/bank is also a joke. So many people don't even know their AV has expired YEARS ago and don't install updates because they are to dumb to read the messages about the update on the screen in front of them.
.....

I think that you are describing computing as it exists today.  I think that you are also describing Bitcoin as of today as well, which admittedly lacks most of the innovations in security you refer to of the past several hundred years.  EG it really is like carrying a round gold coins on your hard drive.

Then again EVERYTHING you mentioned as a drawback has largely already been solved by modern banking/financial services.  Its just that no mainline companies have brought these innovations to Bitcoin.  You just have to have A LITTLE imagination.  

There was a time when people mostly used gold and silver coins in everyday commerce.  The rise of industry and large organizations brought about the need for better payment systems (more secure, both in terms of not having to carry large sums of coins to settle accounts etc.)   So checks and bank notes were introduced years ago.  In fact the Chinese are believed to be the first to use bank notes in the 9th century.  In fact, when Marco Polo found his way to China he brought them back to europe with him because he thought no one would believe him.

You will in the future be able to place your bitcoins on deposit with a financial institution.  You can spend them with the equivalent of a visa or mastercard.  Visa and Mastercard  will charge moderate fees for transactions (probably lower once Bitcoin breaks the monopoly on PMT services).  They will have zero liability policies with respect to fraud.

Today MOST of the money in circulation relies on similar types of trust.  In fact there's something like only $1500 of actual paper cash per american, with about half of that oversees in the hands foreigners.  We already have a mostly cashless society.

You have to use your imagination.  You fail to see how the whole system has already solved all the problems you bring up.